Gender Insight is a new international doctoral training network for the investigation of biopsychosocial influences on gender during (diverse) hormonal transitions led by David Doyle, Baudewijntje Kreukels, and Sabine Hannema. The network brings together a range of disciplines including psychology, history, ethics, endocrinology, neuroscience and public health.
Through co-creation and mixed methods research, 15 new PhD projects will increase our understanding of the influence of biopsychosocial factors during hormonal transitions such as puberty and menopause, in the general population, in people with variations of sex characteristics, and in trans and gender diverse individuals. Historical, clinical and societal lenses will focus attention on different aspects. Collaborating with a range of partners from the non-academic domain, the project aims to have a lasting impact on culture and media, healthcare, and public policy.
David Doyle, Guendalina Di Luigi and Skye Stanwich also attended the 18 European Public Health (EPH) Conference in Helsinki, where Guendalina presented an oral presentation on Adverse childhood experiences in transgender and gender diverse youth seeking care.
In October 2025, we organized a webinar with many of the experience group members in which we shared updates on our projects so far and future plans. We loved discussing this all together, and received very helpful feedback! This included insights on how to better disseminate our work, important avenues for participant recruitment, and suggestions for research questions and concepts to include in our studies.
At the European Professional organisation for Transgender Health (EPATH) conference 2025, several team members presented their work. David Doyle presented a “Year in Review”session on Social & Political Sciences, Nessa Millet presented about Participatory research in trans health, Skye STanwich presented about trends in adolescent referrals, and Sigsten Stieglitz, Guendalina Di Luigi, and Margot Morssinkhof presented posters about their projects.
Affiliated researcher Ed Kiely organized a panel on trans theory at a geography conference in Birmingham in August of 2025, entitled “Geographies of Trans Creativity". The panel addresses the empirical, theoretical, methodological and ethical dimensions of the challenge that trans lives pose for our conventional understandings of central concepts in geography. The panel featured 11 early-career speakers from the UK, Spain and Canada, who discussed their work.
World Professional Association for Transgender Health
The AFFIRM team travelled to Lisbon, Portugal for the WPATH 2024 conference. Here, we organised and delivered a symposium (a group of talks about the same topic) titled 'Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy and Psychosocial Functioning: interconnecting mechanisms' in collaboration with researchers from Melbourne, Australia. Dr David Doyle began the symposium by highlighting the importance of prioritizing social health when measuring well-being, and how this is particularly important during gender affirming hormone therapy. The 3 main talks included:
An update from Dr Nessa Millet on preliminary findings from an interview study where Nessa asked people how they have felt in themselves and in their social well-being since going on gender affirming hormones. Overarching themes discussed related to emotional changes, self-regulation, how people appraised the changes they experiences and the information needs they felt were important.
A presentation from Dr Margot Morssinkhof on a study exploring changes in emotion experiences after starting GAHT. This study looked at whether variability in negative emotions, meaning how much your emotions vary from day to day, changes after starting GAHT. The results of this study show that after a year of GAHT, participants on feminizing hormones reported more variability in negative emotions, whereas participants on masculinizing hormones reported less variability in negative emotions. This study can hopefully help inform trans people who start GAHT to anticipate possible changes in their emotions. You can find a preprint, so a preliminary and non-peer reviewed version of the article.
A presentation from Dr Brendan Nolan on his work investigating the effect of early access to Testosterone therapy on self reported quality of life. You can read the full paper which was recently published.
In July, Nessa went to Antwerp for the 2024 ESHMS conference alongside many other researchers working in health and medical sociology. The theme of the 2024 conference was Intersectionality and inclusion in health. Nessa took this opportunity to present preliminary findings on the qualitative intervew study through an intersectional lense. Her presentation focused predominantly on stories she had heard from participants where they explained how intersecting aspects of their identity (e.g., age, or being neurodivergent) influenced their experience of gender affirming hormone therapy. Nessa would like to thank all of the people who told her their story to make this important research possible.
In May, Margot attended the conference of the Organisation for the Study of Sex Differences (OSSD), in Bergen. she presented a poster here with the results of a study looking into changes in emotion variability after starting with gender affirming hormones, and with this poster dhe won a proze! The visit to this conference was made possible in part by a travel grant from ZonMW.
